Cape Verde: a world-leading, happy-to-share innovation laboratory
Who would suspect that Cape Verde, the island nation hundreds of miles off the western African coast in the Atlantic Ocean, would be a laboratory for innovation? But this is exactly so.
The latest: a fencing programme.
Fencing! In Cape Verde! Sometimes with taped-up plastic pipe for weapons and cut-up water bottles for masks. But a world-class programme nonetheless, one that trained literally dozens of coaches and, as André Pereira, who oversaw the programme day-to-day recounts, now has him getting mobile phone videos of fencing sessions.
“How was it possible to get them so passionate for fencing? It was,” he said,” very rewarding.”
In recent years, the National Olympic Committee of Cape Verde has quietly been a world leader in imagining and then implementing the sorts of 21st-century projects that it has been eager to both model for and then share with other NOCs. Among them:
- ongoing IT equipment renewal;
- 2018 website redesign;
- production, since 2018, of a monthly booklet called Olimpicamente;
- use, again 2018, of CONPaaS, a customer relationship management platform for 21 other NOCs;
- oorganisation in 2021 of a congress for Portuguese-speaking nations;
- development of the ISO 9001 certification framework, 2021-24.
And that’s not all. Since 2017, the NOC has been active in organising courses for sports administrators; in 2019 it ran an advanced sports management course. Particularly in an island nation, these sorts of programmes facilitate community and connection.
As do the exchanges the Cape Verde Olympic Committee has run with, for instance, counterparts in Sao Tome and Principe, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.
It was in this spirit that the fencing programme, as ever under the direction of Leonardo Cunha, the NOC’s presidential advisor, came to be. Cunha recruited Pereira, 39, a MEMOS graduate and Portuguese modern pentathlon champion and experienced fencing coach.
The first phase involved 43 coaches from five of the country’s islands: Santiago, São Vicente, Santo Antão, SaI and Boa Vista.
“In fencing, for the coach there is technical work you have to do one-to-one with the athlete,” Pereira said. “If you don’t have the skill with the weapon, it’s very difficult.”
Fencing jackets, lights, masks, weapons — even with an Olympic Solidarity grant, all of that can be costly. This is why, at the beginning, it was plastic pipe for weapons and retrofitted water bottles for masks, to cover the eyes.
In turn, these 43 coaches introduced about 100 athletes, mostly young kids, to the sport.
The second phase saw 17 of these 43 coaches, plus three others who earlier had been to a programme in Italy, now a total of 20, oversee the country’s first national fencing competition.
Cunha said all credit for the programme’s success goes to Pereira. For his part, Pereira said, “Of course we learnt a lot of things new. But for me it was about the environment — the Olympic environment.”